


(what hath night) to do with sleep

by savingophelia (briennesbeauty)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Fluff, I wrote this for SQW but then my muse wouldn't let me write anything else so, Swan Queen Week Summer 2016, Swan-Mills Family, but the fluff is worth the angst i think, but they're only mentioned for like a paragraph each, emma and regina do too, this is like 2/3 angst and 1/3 domestic fluff, tw for cora and leopold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 22:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7776352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briennesbeauty/pseuds/savingophelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sleeps a little easier as time goes on but it’s never good. It’s never normal, and eventually what Emma learns from all this is that you don’t ever really sleep unless you feel home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(what hath night) to do with sleep

**Author's Note:**

> So I was supposed to do SQW this year but unfortunately this one shot is all my brain provided me with. If I do get round to doing the other days then I'll post them as and when. This one is obviously for day five's prompt, sleeping.
> 
> This, meanwhile, does contain a teeny tiny paragraph referencing Leopold, so be warned. I'm also dropping some TWs for Cora.

Emma’s never slept that well.

 

At six years old Emma learns that if she wants to keep hold of her things she has to fight the tiredness tugging at her eyelids until she’s the only one awake in the whole home, until the sounds of arguing and whispering and the little kids crying and the big kids kissing all die out and she can heart her own breathing and her heartbeat in her ears. She learns that only then can she safely close her eyes, knobby white baby blanket crushed to her chest where nobody can take it. She learns that she’ll have to wake up quickly a few hours later, when one of the kids inevitably starts screaming. 

 

At ten years old Emma learns that if she wants to have a shot at playing the video games the older boys hog during the day, she has to stay awake until they’re all asleep to use it. The same goes for using the computer – she doesn’t like to admit it but sometimes she does write those essays for school. They keep telling her to keep her GPA up and stay out of fights if she wants to last but she never does and she never does and she never does. 

 

(At fourteen she gets one good night, one good night on a soft couch with her stomach full of sweets and a felt-tip star on her wrist and friendship in her head and her legs jumbled up with a pretty girl’s but then the pretty girl’s dad shows up and she wasn’t really her friend at all, and Emma doesn’t sleep much in the weeks after that.) 

 

At sixteen years old Emma learns that if she wants to stay alive she can’t sleep during the night. In the night, there are guys in hoodies on the street smoking hash and guys with knives and she’s just a skinny kid with a Bic lighter and a blanket in her bag. Sometimes in the day she’ll catch an hour or so on the grass in the park and people will just think she’s a normal teenage kid spending some time outside and that’s nice. 

At night, she wanders around, watching the cars speed by on the lit-up highway and the rain glow off the pavement in the orange light of the streetlamps with only the stray cats for company. One of them is small and black and missing half an ear and they get on swimmingly. 

It doesn’t take long for him to get hit by one of those cars.

Emma stops talking to the cats after that. 

 

At seventeen years old Emma learns that if they want to get anywhere she and Neal have to take shifts driving the Bug wherever it is they’re going next. She prefers driving, watching the road speed by and feeling the pedals under her feet but the sleeping isn’t bad either. In fact, for the first time in her life it’s okay. The back seat is hard and curling up there is cramped and makes her shoulders ache but it’s safe and it’s easy and Neal’s there and it’s the closest thing she’s ever had to a regular bed and a regular home. 

 

At eighteen years old Emma learns that you might as well give up on sleep in prison. The beds are shitty and the lights in the hallway stay on and someone’s shouting and the food leaves you feeling empty inside. 

Everything does. 

 

At eighteen Emma also learns that you don’t sleep when you’re pregnant. Instead you toss and turn and you’ll never be comfortable and your back aches and you’re craving oranges but all you get is prison food, and nobody cares, and you just want this stupid thing out of you. You wonder why anyone would do this by choice. 

You wonder if this is how your mother felt when she decided to get rid of you. 

 

At twenty two years old Emma learns that irregular people don’t sleep in regular beds anyway, that square pegs don’t go through round holes. She learns this the first night she spends in her new apartment, with the sounds of the city rushing on outside the window and a real mattress under her back and a thousand worries and thoughts buzzing round her head, keeping her wide awake. 

The covers feel too soft and too good and maybe that newspaper article about men who survive alone in the wild and then come home and can only sleep on the floor was truer than she thought. So she works out at night and drinks shitty instant coffee during the day. It tastes like stomach bile but at least she can keep her eyes open. 

 

At twenty eight years old Emma learns that it’s a hell of a lot easier not to sleep when you have crazy shit going on around every corner. You can blame it on your new job as a cop, you can blame it on your family tree, you can blame it on the maddening and maddeningly beautiful mother of your child. 

 

She sleeps a little easier as time goes on but it’s never good. It’s never normal, and eventually what Emma learns from all this is that you don’t ever really sleep unless you feel home. 

 

-

 

Regina’s never slept that well. 

 

At six years old Regina learns that if she wants to get any sleep she needs to be a good girl and do as Mama says or else she won’t be allowed to sleep in her room. She’ll have to spend the night in the cellar where it’s too dark and she can hear Mama’s collection of hearts through the wall, beating out of time all night like a monster or the victims of a monster she still loves. It’s all very confusing and scary and she never sleeps when she’s in there.

 

At ten years old Regina learns that if she wants to get any sleep she needs to be a good girl and do as Mother says or else the bruises will ache all night, the marks that magic leave will hurt too badly for her to even think of drifting off. 

 

At fourteen years old Regina learns that if she wants to get any sleep she has to bury herself deep under the blankets and try to focus on her own breathing and her own heartbeat instead of the sounds of her mother hurting some servant who displeased her, just a few corridors away. She and that servant have a lot in common.

 

At seventeen years old Regina learns that if she wants to get any sleep she’s going to have to stop thinking about the way it feels when Daniel smiles at her, breathless and honest with happiness curling across his mouth and his beautiful eyes. She’s going to have to stop thinking about the way he touches her arms and her waist when they kiss, so gently and carefully like she’s good and normal and worth something. 

She’s going to have to stop thinking about all that if she wants to calm the butterflies fluttering in her tummy and keeping her up all night, and as _if_ she’s going to do that. She’d much rather stay awake with Daniel in her head than fall asleep without him. 

 

At eighteen years old Regina learns a lot of things. 

She learns that it’s turned around, and if she wants to get any sleep she has to have Daniel back. She won’t ever sleep again, she thinks, not with a hole in her heart the size of a stable boy, not with the pain in her gut and her frozen lungs that she can at least pretend to squash down during the day but that rises up in her throat and chokes her every night, until all she can do is sob into her pillow as quietly as she can. 

Her whole body shakes so violently she’d be worried if she cared about anything else but his memory, her empty stomach aches and her she swears every night she feels her heart shrivel up and curl in on itself like a summer flower rotting and dying with the onset of winter. She doesn’t sleep. She lies there, and for the first time since they met she can’t feel him somewhere lying out there too. She lies there, and for the first time since they met she feels alone. 

 

At eighteen Regina learns that she’ll never sleep in the castle. It’s too big, it’s too loud, it’s too essentially _not hers_. It doesn’t belong to her. Instead, she belongs to it, to a spoiled little girl and a self-righteous old man and no matter how much she tries to distract herself she’ll never forget that she is a prisoner here. She’s the proverbial broken bird in a gilded cage, a pretty cage full of pretty things but a cage nonetheless. 

There are guards outside her door that do not answer to her. 

 

And at eighteen Regina learns that she’ll never, ever sleep after Leopold. She doesn’t believe in wishing stars or fairy godmothers or miracles because it’s clear by now they’re not meant for her, but she thanks every god there is that she doesn’t have to sleep next to him.  
It’s hard coming back to her own chambers afterwards, but at least there she can order a bath so scalding hot it burns the other kind of pain away, scrub her skin until it’s red and raw and at least it doesn’t look as dirty as it feels. At least there she can swear her fury into her pillow. At least there she can cry until her eyes hurt and there’s nothing left inside her but emptiness. 

 

At nineteen Regina learns you don’t get any sleep when you’re the Dark One’s apprentice. Instead, you sit up at the table by the window all night with your candle burning down to a stub, and you read and read and read everything he’s told you to, not just because you’re still a little afraid of him, but because you want to. Because it makes you feel alive, when trying to sleep just makes you wish you were dead. 

 

At twenty-one Regina learns you don’t get any sleep when you’re the Dark One’s apprentice and you’ve actually killed something. You don’t regret it and that scares what’s left of your soul even more. You don’t cry. You just lay in the dark and think about the feeling of a heart beating in your hand and think about your mother and you don’t feel anything at all. 

 

At twenty-six Regina learns that queens don’t sleep. And it’s odd, because she thought she’d sleep so much better when Leopold was dead. Instead, she just worries about finances and harvests and where Snow White is hiding, out there somewhere in the forest she now has to rule. It’s what she wanted, and it feels better, but she still can’t sleep. 

 

At thirty Regina learns that infertility potions hurt. They hurt all night, in the same way Mother’s magic hurt when she was little and Mother’s appearance in her life hurts now, and once again she finds herself lying in bed crying into the pillow, clutching her stomach like a little girl. She’s just as alone as she was back then. Briefly, she wonders if she was ever anything else. 

 

At thirty two Regina learns that sleep isn’t any easier to come by in small Maine towns than it is in the Enchanted Forest. But there are helpful inventions in the Land Without Magic, tricks and tools designed for people like her. Here, Regina can take sleeping pills and use lavender oil and earplugs and a sleeping mask, but it seems that no matter how many tablets she takes she never feels any less tired.

 

In the Land Without Magic, Regina also learns mothers do not sleep, because small babies do not sleep. Little princes with blue bobble hats and tiny pink faces scream all night, or want to play or hear stories, and Regina’s all too happy to oblige. It’s a wonderful kind of not sleeping, not sleeping with Henry on her hip listening to her read to him and sing lullabies under her breath. 

For the first time, not sleeping is a blessing instead of a curse, but as he grows up and starts sleeping through, she still finds herself staring at the ceiling waiting for dreams that never come. 

 

She sleeps easier as time goes on but it’s never good. It’s never normal, and eventually what Regina learns from all this is that you don’t ever really sleep unless you feel safe. 

 

-

 

After eight years of hatred and love and family and sacrifice, Emma learns that Regina likes to sleep curled up on her side, and she wakes up early. After eight years of belief and silence and hope and battles, Regina learns that Emma snores very lightly when she’s dreaming, and she likes to come up behind her and cuddle her while she sleeps. 

 

Emma learns that it’s surprisingly easy for your heart to slow down, and your breath to relax and your eyelids to get heavy when you can hear your son snoring down the hall, and you have your wife in your arms and the smell of home and her perfume on the Egyptian-cotton sheets. (She insisted on paying extra for them at the store, and Emma learned she could never deny her anything.)

 

Regina learns that it’s surprisingly easy for your defences to drop down, and your shoulders un-tense and your heart to grow soft when you know your son is safe down the hall, and you’re wrapped up in your wife’s arms and the smell of vanilla-cinnamon-leather-home is all around you, and the plaid pyjamas you’ve always teased her for are soft against your bare legs. 

 

They have their routine and for the most part, they follow it. They say goodnight to Henry, and there’s usually a hugging session, or sometimes one group hug. Sometimes he stays up later than them, doing homework and texting his friends (he never tells Regina when it’s Violet, and Emma never blames him) and the light from his bedroom creeps under the crack of their bedroom door and there’s something comforting about it. 

Then they’ll retreat quietly to their own room, the room where Regina used to lie awake alone, or next to Graham, and wonder what the hell she was doing or what the next threat would be. The room looks different to how it did then: now, Emma’s baby blanket has joined the white comforter on the queen-sized bed; there is a whole row of boots beside the designer heels in the cupboard; there is a sheriff’s badge gleaming on the nightstand. 

There is a feeling like belonging in the air, a feeling like security in the plaid shirt thrown over the chair, in the line of framed family photographs that stand on the windowsill.

 

And so every night they climb under the thick covers together and before they close their eyes they lie and look at each other, half a pillow away, no make-up, no walls, no fears they can’t face together. Then one of them – usually Regina – makes the first brave move and either rolls over or snuggles closer, depending on her mood. Emma’s heart spills with warmth and she wraps her arms around her, always careful to watch the brunette’s response before holding her tighter, because she knows what this woman has been through. 

(She’s still careful, with her own heart and Regina’s, but now that means security and warmth instead of loneliness and fear.) (Now it’s right.)

 

Regina will usually sigh like she’s just sunk into a bath after a long day, and Emma will usually drop a kiss on her shoulder and they’ll lie there, breathing easily with their calm hearts beating out of time and eyelids will close, muscles will relax, mouths will release soft snores and nothing else. 

 

And Regina feels safe, and Emma feels home, and for the first time in a long time there are no nightmares or screams or empty feelings in the dark. 

 

Because Regina feels safe, and Emma feels home, and finally, finally –  
They sleep.


End file.
